When Haleon set to demerge from GSK, its legal department faced a challenge: hit the ground running with a full catalog of legal services on day one—no small task for a global consumer health company with brands including Flonase, Centrum, Advil, Tums, and Theraflu, to name a few. In January 2021, leaders of the Haleon legal team began working to prepare for uninterrupted service delivery and ensuring almost everything the Haleon legal team did set it up for the future.

In July 2022, Haleon’s legal team hit the ground running with a Contracting CoE that resulted in:

• 70% fewer contracting templates across the organization helping achieve 40% faster response times and more positive interactions with partners.
• 30% increased speed to data driven decisions, standardized processes across multiple business units, and process pillars within the enterprise.
• 40% of the team quickly embraced the initiative to become digital citizens in the first six months.

Haleon’s forward-looking approach to legal operations and outside counsel management provides ongoing value:

• Provides data-backed insights to inform decisions related to all aspects of outside counsel management.

• Maximizes value well beyond cost takeout, risk mitigation, and brand protection to include a wide range of other benefits that are integral to how a legal department can add value.

Together, these initiatives continued to add value with these accomplishments:

• Established a digitally enabled, customer-centric, data-driven legal department.

• Increased capacity 30%, with all requests tracked across the enterprise legal organization.

• Boosted performance related to service delivery and client satisfaction by approximately 15%.

In a webinar that was part of Buying Legal Council’s Wednesday Webinar series, key stakeholders of the ongoing partnership discussed goals, challenges, and lessons learned. The discussion revealed practical steps for embarking upon a similar plan to modernize an organization’s legal function.

Bob Mignanelli, VP & COO Legal for Haleon, began by outlining the challenge at hand:

It was both a challenge and a tremendous opportunity. When I came to the organization in early 2021, a lot of the groundwork for separation had already been laid. It was a multiyear process that GSK and the consumer teams had undertaken to prepare for what eventually was a demerger of the consumer business to create Haleon as a standalone publicly traded company, and I think our biggest challenge was to ensure that, as of the data separation, there was continuity of legal services for the company. That was always item number one. Everything else was almost a distant second, because we needed to make sure that...we didn’t create material risk by things falling through the cracks or not being prepared.

Below are some of the topics covered during this discussion:

Forecasting the coming changes

Signing up to join this separation, you have to have a degree of willingness for a bit of an adventure and willingness for change.

When we separated, we didn’t necessarily have the structure right when I arrived. So, we used the time between when I arrived and when we separated to build out those two departments.

And so those presented all the challenges you could imagine. One was, from a people perspective, how do we staff this? Do we have the right staff? What should our staffing model look like? What should our scope of service catalog be?

Then we looked at the two long poles in the tent which are processed in tech. You know, how do we either develop processes, reengineer processes, or redefine processes so they’re fit for purpose for Haleon? And then, at that point that we’ve gotten there, how do we start to overlay tech?

We had those challenges, and then you overlay a bit of a data challenge. Anybody who’s disintegrated companies, disintegrated businesses, changed systems, a lot of folks on the call can probably relate to this; even if you just change out a CLM [contract lifecycle management], you’ve got data integration issues. And so, for us, there was a bit of a challenge of trying to identify appropriate data sets, whether that was around data sets to help inform contracts, volumes, and clients; where demand was coming from; and how to service that demand.

Supporting the organization’s vision

It all comes back to driving that vision and overall ensuring that we are delivering services to the company that are facilitating its objectives and protecting it.

I know I keep coming back to that, but everything anchors back to that. Everything anchors back to that core mission with the vision overlaid on it. And then driving an operating model or constructing in driving an operating model around those two items that we think is best in class.

When we thought about how we were going to do that, this was in our opinion the best approach for us moving forward to continue to drive where we want to go from a digital transformation standpoint.

Applicable across many legal disciplines

When you step back and look at where the model has come, we’re probably in seven or eight of our functional areas across the department in varying degrees of resourcing but all coming back to this one-team, this very nimble model.

I don’t want anybody walking away thinking, “Okay, this is a model that can only be used where you have things that are highly transactional or highly process driven. When you really think about the evolution of this, you can take it as far as you want, because it’s flexible enough to where you can modulate it, and we’ve done that.

As we look towards the future and as we look towards where we want to go next, we have the ability to dial up and dial down to meet business needs.

Making a business case for transformation

What I’d like to leave everybody with is that you have opportunities out there in your existing environment, wherever your department may be, wherever your company may be, to really help to develop solutions that help drive value and drive the objectives of your department and for your business.

And I think that there are different models that can be done with that. Especially with the professionals on this call, I think you have a true opportunity to work with either your legal leaders or your business leaders to really identify solutions that can drive value, because what will drive value for one company may not drive value for another. But it’s out there, and it doesn’t need to be daunting.

There are a lot of great partners out there, but I would say stay true to your model. Because that’s the key to all of this: the deep, deep trust in your partner. Then, you will start to see. The results will start to show, and they will start to get delivered.

And as that starts to happen, it will put you on your journey to wherever you’ve determined that you want to be.

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